


there's something happening somewhere

by maybetwice



Category: Pitch (TV 2016)
Genre: Cohabitation, F/M, Injury Recovery, Mutual Pining, Post-Season/Series 01, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-11 01:21:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8947573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/maybetwice
Summary: A whole baseball career isn't more than a sliver of a whole life, but neither Ginny nor Mike have figured out what else there is for them.Or, Mike's Glass Case of Emotion has a lot of spare bedrooms and Ginny literally lives in a hotel.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nighimpossible](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nighimpossible/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, nighimpossible!! 
> 
> I had tremendous fun writing this fic for you and I hope very much that you enjoy it! I wanted to get to the essence of your prompt – Ginny makes Mike a better person, and Mike makes Ginny a better player – and the utterly crushing end of the season delivered this to me.
> 
> Work title from, of course, Bruce Springsteen's 'Dancing In The Dark'.

Mike almost doesn’t come. There’s a hundred reasons Baker won’t want to see his mug on her doorstep, not even three weeks after surgery. Mike’s too old to be kidding himself: they more or less start and end with that night at Boardner’s. The rest of it – that the trade fell through, or that he lost the team, or that he’s at least halfway to blame for Ginny getting that last start – is just a reason to feel even worse about himself. Just because they’re not going to talk about it doesn’t mean he’s not thinking about it. It’s the sort of thing he can’t take back, can’t forget, can’t deal with. 

Still, Mike can pull his shit together and go see an injured teammate when he knows she’s on her own in the darkest part of a ballplayer’s career. He gets his ass dressed and goes to the Omni.

Ginny lets him into her hotel room immediately, trying to pretend that this isn’t a little weird for either of them. But she has her little tells, like when she chooses her words carefully and that little worry wrinkle appears in the center of her forehead. 

So, she flops down onto the couch and blusters, just like Mike does when he’s pinned. She looks tired, defeated, like she hasn’t been eating or sleeping for weeks. And could he blame her? She asks, “You didn't have literally anyone else you could come see? You could have brought flowers.”

Mike shrugs, looking around the little place she’s been living in since June. A kitchenette. A couch. A bed. Yeah, it’s good enough for a spot starter called up from the minors, maybe a number five pitcher in her rookie year. It’s not great for a 23-year-old woman, let alone one who’s still wearing a brace after life-changing, possibly career-ending surgery.

“Well, seeing as you're the only one who'll look me in the face right now, yeah. Move over.” He raps her on the thigh until she scoots down the couch, but doesn't sit down. Not at first, anyway. 

Instead, Mike reaches over her head to check the ice pack from her shoulder to her elbow. It's still cold enough, though he makes a mental note to change it for her in twenty minutes. Ginny watches him, her eyes like spotlights on him, like she expects something from him other than what he’s doing.

“God,” says Ginny when he finally sits back in the couch next to her. “Just look at the two of us.”

Mike can’t help laughing at that, adds it to the list of things he’s going to miss about her one day, when he retires and she’s the Padres’ number two pitcher, right behind Sonny in the line up. “Everybody's least favorite team captain and–”

“–and a washed up rookie,” supplies Ginny with savage ferocity. Yeah, she’s not handling this well. Shocker, right there.

“I was going to say, everybody's favorite number five pitcher.”

“Yeah, right.”

He leans back into the couch and lays the crown of his head against her depressingly papered wall. “People still love the hell of of you, Baker. Doesn't change because of elbow surgery. Takes a lot more than that to lose them.”

“You're trying to make me feel better.” Ginny’s expression shifts to something so miserable that Mike’s stomach twists uncomfortably, wanting so badly to fix it for her. Go back in time, stop the whole thing from ever happening. 

“Is it working?” he asks instead.

She doesn't laugh, which is answer enough for Mike. Ginny loves to laugh, is never more than a blink and a well timed joke from one. But now Ginny just looks at her hands, studying her fingernails. Her hands are worth millions. He can't blame her wondering if it's all a waste now. 

“What would it look like in the history books, that the first woman in the majors blew it all on bad fielding?” She looks up at him and for a full second Mike can't move when he sees there are tears glittering at the corners of her eyes. 

_Shit._

“Hey, Baker,” he spills out, pulling an arm around her shoulder because it’s killing him to see her like this. The idea that she’s beating herself up because he couldn’t keep his head on straight is too much. “What the hell? You have the whole offseason to recover. You might not even spend all that much time on the DL. And, if you do – do you know how long I was out for an ACL tear?”

“Seven months, twelve days,” recites Ginny, and of course she knows that. Mike feels a little weird about her having his stats and professional biography memorized, but then he's memorized the exact tilt of her face when she's going to accept his pitch call and the correlation between his batting average and her ERA. So, maybe it's fair after all.

“Yeah,” he agrees flatly. “And a month in triple-A for good measure. Sucked really hard.”

She looks up with a vulnerable expression that crushes his heart to pulp before she can even ask, “Do you think they’re going to send me back down?”

He wants to tell her that it’s all going to be fine as soon as she asks, if for no other reason than to make her smile. But Ginny deserves better than that. She deserves more than hollow comfort from him. She deserves the truth. Mike gives her a careful squeeze and says, “Not for good.” 

“But back down.” Ginny covers her face with her left hand, sucks in a tight breath of air that sounds a lot like trying not to cry. 

“It’s not the end of the world.”

“It is to me, Mike!” The ferocity of her anger surprises him, but Mike doesn’t pull away, not even when he realizes she’s not finished. “This game is everything I have. What else is there?”

Mike thinks about the time Al sat his ass down in his office and told him he was going down to the minors to recover. Remembers being thirty-two and listening – actually listening for once in his fucking life – when Al leaned against the desk and told him the story of his last season in baseball.

That was five years before and 2017 has to be it for him. Mike doesn’t have another two seasons in him and it’s not like the Padres will let him have his long goodbye like Jeter got before Duarte ends up behind the plate full-time. He’s going to have to make it all work with what he has left to him. And then? 

_What else is there?_

Well, there’s horseshoes in the south of France.

He doesn’t say any of that to Ginny now, because he doesn’t think it’ll help, and it’s not about him anyway. Instead, he gestures vaguely to her miserable little hotel room.

“You need a change of scenery, rookie. Move out of the hotel room.”

Finally, _that’s_ what makes a little laugh bubble up from her chest. “Yeah, this is a great time for moving, Lawson.”

He gives her a soft nudge with his elbow, grinning at her because he can’t help it. “What’s to move? You own literally nothing but spandex leggings.”

“Rude,” she says, but she’s still laughing at least. “What do you know about my wardrobe?”

Mike wants to keep this going, wants to say something smart about how he never sees her in anything else, except the occasional time he’s seen her in formal dress, and that time he saw her dolled up for a date. But that way lies madness, and so he pulls himself up with crackling knees and goes to get her a fresh ice pack a few minutes early. 

Replacing the ice pack himself, he offers, “You can stay with me,” before his higher brain functions can stop him. 

Ginny’s fingers freeze in place, where she was guiding the ice pack into place. Panic flashes in her widened eyes. “Yeah,” she says shakily, “I’m sure _that’s_ a great idea.”

God, he wants her to understand. Wants her to know he’s trying to be decent to her because he cares. Maybe it’s a byproduct of being more than a little in love with her, but what it’s not is a play to get into her pants. He clears his throat pointedly, squaring his shoulders and finishing with her ice pack. “You know Blip let me live in his guest room for six weeks after Rachel filed for divorce?” 

“Nope.” She’s still searching him out for ulterior motives, chewing the edge of her lip cautiously. 

“Yeah,” he goes on, sits down next to her again. “Right around this time of year, actually. I laid on the floor and listened to Ben Folds Five on repeat until Evelyn snapped the CD in half.”

“With her bare hands?” she giggles nervously. 

“Yeah,” he grins, pulling a hand down his face and tugging at his beard. “I can’t hear ‘Brick’ without thinking about her face when it shattered. She took me house hunting the next day. Closed on the place I live in two weeks later.”

“Wow.” Ginny doesn’t bother hiding her smile behind her hand, but then it fades again. She’s not okay. 

Mike presses forward. Now he’s offered, it’s not like he can take it back and not make it any weirder than it already is. “Look, the point is that it’s my turn to pay it forward. You live in a hotel, Baker.”

“Maybe I like the breakfast here,” she interjects, earning herself a spectacular eye roll from Mike. “Maybe the beds are comfortable.”

“They’re not,” says Mike in a flat, unimpressed voice, gives her another nudge. “Come on. I’ve got five bedrooms. My guest bathroom is bigger than your entire suite.”

“Okay,” agrees Ginny with a faint laugh. She looks tired again. “But I’ll warn you, Lawson, I’m a terrible roommate and an even worse patient.”

He tries not to let too many of his emotions bleed into his voice when he lifts his eyebrows at her and says, “Great.” Mike stands up and goes looking for her meds, which he finds on the counter, along with a stack of instructions and dosages. “I’m not washing your laundry, though.”

“Ew,” she laughs, starting to rise from the couch, and only falls back into the cushions when Mike gives her a warning look. 

He doesn’t want to push her into this. He doesn’t even want to keep talking about it until she decides on her own, worried that Ginny might think he’s being a creep. Ginny watches him move through her hotel suite, collecting the things she needs before he leaves her to make up her own mind. 

“Okay,” Ginny says finally, when Mike hands over a fistful of pills and a cup of water. 

Her attempt at a smile is a little weak, he thinks, but that’s okay. She’s bare weeks out from one of the worst days of her life. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever get back to playing baseball. Like she said, what else is there? But that’s fine. It makes them suit each other’s company now more than ever: Mike doesn’t know how he’ll ever live without playing baseball, either. He’s just a lot closer to having to figure it out.

“No promises I won’t listen to emo music the whole time, though.”

“No promises I won’t break your iPhone when you do,” he returns instantly, and at least they’re both smiling.

*

Ginny finally moves into his guest room two weeks later. She’s still wearing her brace, hovering just beside his shoulder while he moves her small collection of belongings. She wouldn’t let him pack up her clothes and a bellhop brings most of her bags down to his car, but she doesn’t say much while Mike carries the few things she has up to the wide, sunlit guest room he picked for her.

Mike is too busy most of the year to bother looking too closely at his other bedrooms, and it’s not like he has all that many guests, really. He hired a decorator to make the house look put together, but he didn’t notice that this one has the nicest view of the garden of all the bedrooms. It seems important somehow that it does, so he tidies it up a little himself, changes the sheets to something soft and comfortable, buys flowers for the little table in the corner. 

“Wow,” Ginny says with a low whistle when she follows him inside. 

Mike sets her suitcase next to the enormous closet, which he somehow doubts she’ll use for much, and tucks his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Somehow, he’s become attached to the idea of impressing her with his hosting skills. “I told you it would be better than the hotel.”

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Ginny says, her dimples popping on her cheeks when she grins over her shoulder at him, one hand half-extended to a cluster of tight-petaled flowers the color of butter. “They used to bring me flower arrangements when I won my starts.” 

“See if I ever buy you flowers again,” he complains with good humor, rubs a hand over his hair absently. “You need a little time to get settled?” 

“I did a lot of work today,” she says in a very serious voice before her tendency to giggle uncontrollably overtakes her. She’s already doing a little better. “Actually, you don’t mind if I just want to…” Ginny’s slim hand – the one that’s not braced close to her chest – gestures vaguely to the room. To be alone, he can surmise from the way she looks curiously at the rest of the room.

“Whatever you need, roomie,” he says and instantly feels like he’s going to regret making a joke about being roommates, even though that’s what they are now. 

“Yeah, that’s going to take some getting used to,” Ginny grins. “My last roommate was in San Antonio. I’m not used to doing this.” 

But living with Ginny has a certain natural quality to it that Mike appreciates, not at all the jarring experience of living with another person for the first time since Evelyn helped him find this place. To be honest, Ginny is his first roommate since before he was drafted, unless he counts Rachel. But a wife isn’t a roommate, and though living with Ginny has a few odd similarities to living with Rachel, it's not the same thing. Mike isn’t really sure what it means when he stops himself from putting an arm around her waist in the morning and complaining about her sleeping through fifteen minutes of alarms.

They have their respective schedules – training, rehabilitation, strength-building – but they almost always end up sitting in the same part of the house when the day’s over. Ginny puts on weird movies and laughs at the sports autobiographies he reads with his spare time. They’re comfortable living side by side. More comfortable than he would have guessed, even if he’d ever once indulged the outrageous thought of living with Ginny Baker. Even her annoying habits – singing loud and offkey in the fucking shower, for example – somehow don’t kill his attraction to her the way they should. Not even the worst of them. 

Mike does most of the cooking – he’s no great cook, learned most of how to feed himself from being emancipated at sixteen and what team nutritionists could teach him. But Ginny? Ginny is a disaster in the kitchen, probably because she devoted every waking second of her life after the age of four to baseball. She makes pretty good coffee, but she starts a kitchen fire trying to make breakfast the morning after getting out of her brace. 

She shouts for him immediately and is fumbling for a cup of water when Mike bolts down from his bedroom in a pair of shorts and nothing else, panicked adrenaline pumping in his ears. He manages to put it out with the lid to a pot before it spreads past the stove, then wheels around to look at her with a thunderous expression. Ginny looks a little embarrassed, holding her cup of water close to her chest, but she’s not even singed.

“Jesus Christ, rookie,” he puffs out, scrubbing one hand through his beard. His eyes are still a little heavy from sleep. It’s not even fully light outside, just a crack of sun on pale gray. “You’re getting cooking classes for your birthday.”

It doesn’t even occur to him that this is a little awkward until Ginny’s eyes abruptly turn back to his face and he realizes she’s checking him out. Well, it’s not the first time she’s seen him wearing this little, he thinks stubbornly, because he’s _not_ going to think about the exact way she pulls her bottom lip between her teeth when she looks away. 

“Anyway,” says Mike forcefully, pulling back the lid now that the fire’s gone out. Her scorched attempt at breakfast goes into the garbage can and Ginny retreats to one of the stools lined up at the counter. Somehow, being half-dressed in the clubhouse with her is completely different than being half-naked in his kitchen. Mike knows what the difference is. Probably Ginny does, too.

By the time he finishes breakfast for her, she doesn’t look chastened anymore. Ginny makes some sharp remark about him eating the same thing every morning and Mike fires back about her starving to death if someone didn’t cook for her. 

“Maybe I’ll get a husband to do it for me,” she says, grinning at him before biting into her toast. “I can bring home the bacon.”

Mike makes himself roll his eyes at her, pretend that he isn’t blindly jealous of any man, imagined or real, who gets to roll out of bed and make breakfast for Ginny Baker. For about half a second, he allows himself to look at her for real, take in the spandex shorts and t-shirt she sleeps in. It takes him even less time than that to regret it.

“Well, until you can find that kept man, dishes are your problem, _roomie,_ ” he says instead, dropping the pan into the sink.

“Ah, fuck you,” Ginny says, giggling uncontrollably over her eggs.

*

Things are pretty good through when they get into November, although Mike thinks the rest of the world is a fucking disaster. When he asked her to move in, the implied promise was that they’d be doing it as friends and teammates and not the kind of people who were half an inch and a heartbeat from irreversibly changing that relationship. But it is working, even if they need the little unspoken habits that keep it nice and easy. Mike makes excuses to be out of the house when she’s cleared to swim in his pool, even though it’s really not warm enough for that as the temperature drops late in the year. And if Ginny stops working out in his gym and starts taking long, brutal runs in the neighborhood, Mike pretends that it’s because she likes the scenery and not because long hours alone in the gym invites intrusive thoughts about the other.

And then Blip comes over after three weeks of pointedly ignoring what’s happening, like Mike and Ginny haven’t made a huge fucking mistake. Like this is really, actually working out.

“When the hell were you going to mention that Ginny was living with you, man?” Blip says it like a joke, with a half-formed grin, but it’s anything but that and Mike knows it. Blip was in that room with Mike and Omar back in August, and he’s one of the sharpest guys Mike knows. 

He shrugs like there’s nothing remarkable about it, because there _can’t_ be anything remarkable about Ginny borrowing his body wash when she runs out, swimming in his pool, laying out next to him on the couch at night. “She was living in a hotel, Blip,” he reminds him. 

Blip shrugs off his jacket and follows Mike, his eyebrows pulled down the way he does when he’s focusing. “She could have moved in with Evie and me. Dude, please don’t tell me I’m going to have to give you the shovel talk.”

“Shovel talk,” Mike echoes, and yeah, he probably needs one. He needs someone to reprogram his whole brain, all the little neural connections that have him wanting to reach out and pull her up against him when they watch TV. She’s a ballplayer. So’s he. Mike wishes to God he could just reset the whole damn relationship and go back to talking hitters, as if that would even help. Mike doesn’t think he’s the smartest guy around, but he’s experienced enough to have figured out by now that he was fucked from the minute she walked up to him and told him she had his rookie card.

Instead of letting Blip do just that, he thrusts a beer into his chest and gestures for him to follow out back. “There is exactly nothing to talk about here, Blip,” he tells him flatly, sounding unconvincing to himself, but Blip doesn’t push. When he lowers himself into a cushioned chair with a creak and a twitch of pain, Mike looks meaningfully back at Blip, still standing next to him. 

“Besides,” he says finally, “you and Evelyn needed some space to be married for a while, right?” 

“Yeah.” Blip finally sits down, staring at his bottle intently. “Yeah, I guess we did.”

Mike looks over at him thoughtfully. Blip’s talked a little about it since he and Mike started mending their fences, but Mike gets the feeling he doesn’t know everything about their fight, except that it was probably the most serious one he’s seen Blip and Evelyn have. Sometimes he thinks that his married friends aren’t totally comfortable talking to him about their problems, knowing how badly it went for him. So, he just gives Blip a nudge and asks, “Everything good now?”

“Not everything,” answers Blip with a little half-smile. “But on the way there. We’re going to be all right.”

“Just keep talking to her,” Mike says by way of advice, looking back down to his beer. That’s the only advice he has for a married man, really. The only advice he could have used, if only because it meant he’d have figured out that he and Rachel were on different tracks for most of their marriage, just hoping that the other wouldn’t find out. Blip and Evelyn are too good to call it quits over something they can talk about, figure out together. 

“I’m not done talking to you about Ginny,” Blip warns after a long silence. “Because she’s in a vulnerable place right now and it would be really bad for you to fuck this up, Mike.”

“She’s an adult,” Mike reminds him. “And she’s our teammate. So far all she’s done is try to burn down my house and make me watch Love And Basketball five times.” 

Blip laughs at that. “Is that your way of telling me to butt out?”

“It’s my way of telling you that it’s not like that.” Even if some part of Mike really, really wants it to be like that. It’s not even a small part of him, it’s just all held in check by the remnants of his common sense and the sense that he really might fuck it up, might fuck _her_ up by letting her see how much he wants it. 

“If you say so.” Blip raises his eyebrows at him until Mike finally looks over to him, and then he shrugs. “I’m just saying. Ginny told Evie about that night back when you were talking to the Cubs.”

“She did?” That surprises him, for reasons that Mike will need to examine later, when he’s alone. He knows that normal people talk to their friends about this sort of thing, unless they think it’s not important. Mike doesn’t only because he’s a fucking genius at repressed emotion. 

“Yeah,” says Blip, sounding exhausted. “So I _know_ you’re not going to lie to me and say there’s nothing between you two.”

Mike tries for a shrug, a casual laugh that comes out sharp and a little bitter. “We agreed not to talk about it,” he says, pulling his breath in between his teeth, shakes his head once. “Not as long as we’re teammates. So, that’s that. And she’s living in my guest room.”

“Well, shit.” 

“Yeah.” Mike finishes his beer rather than elaborate on that, because what else is there to say but _yeah?_ “So, are you going to ask me over for Thanksgiving this year?”

Blip looks visibly relieved to be talking about something normal, not the threat that Mike is plotting to rip apart the team dynamics. “Depends. Are you going to blow us off again this year?” 

Which is what Mike has done for the last two holidays, even the one where he was living with the Sanders. Holidays are hard for him, but it seems worth the effort this year. Ginny’s mom is going to _Kevin’s_ and her brother’s still not talking to her, although that’s about all Mike knows about her family situation beyond the dead dad thing. He isn’t even sure if she wants to celebrate anything at all, but he can’t mope around in silence with Ginny there. Deep down, he thinks they matter a lot more to her than him. 

Still, Mike is actually surprised by her enthusiasm for spending Thanksgiving with the Sanders. All of her seems to perk up around them, and though she has to warn the boys that they can’t hang on her like a tree, she still rough houses with them in the living room while Mike helps Evelyn in the kitchen. 

And speaking of: Evelyn is surprisingly silent about Ginny living with him, although Mike has the faintest impression from the looks she shoots Ginny that this is a conversation she’s having, just not with him. As long as Mike is playing prep cook to her, chopping vegetables and pulling things off the top shelves, Evelyn just talks with bubblegum cheer about the boys’ Spanish immersion elementary school, about the restaurant she’s developing downtown, about the ski trip she and Blip and the boys are taking over Christmas. It’s exactly the kind of normalcy that Mike forgets that he needs. He forgot that Ginny needs it, too, while they’ve been in their own bubble.

There are a few things they don’t talk about, including baseball. Blip’s stressed about his contract year, Ginny’s stressed about her recovery, and Mike hasn’t told either of them that he’s retiring at the end of the upcoming season. He hasn’t told anyone, really. It’s better that they don’t, he tells himself when they finally say their goodbyes.

“That was really good,” Ginny says with a deeply satisfied sigh, massaging her stomach in the passenger seat of his car on the ride back to his house. “I’m beat.”

“You looked like you were enjoying yourself,” he says, feeling weirdly pleased for finally anticipating one of her needs and actually meeting them. “Lucky you, you won’t have to spend the next month getting ready to do it all over again.”

Ginny swats at him playfully when he stops at a red light. “I’m glad they’re going to Aspen for Christmas,” she says, looking out into the dark. Mike can see her face reflected in the window, can see the pull of despair at the corners of her mouth there. She looks a little like she did when he showed up in her hotel room back in September. 

As a kid, Mike spent Christmas with his mom. After he left home, he was more or less on his own until he married Rachel and spent every holiday with her family. Those weren’t all that great, either, he remembers, but maybe family Christmas isn’t supposed to be fighting with his wife in the bathroom between nosy aunts smugly asking when Rachel was going to settle down and let Mike get her pregnant. Maybe Ginny’s childhood Christmas memories are something precious, something from back before the Baker family let baseball and a drunk driver pull them to the winds.

“You think?” he says mildly, tapping his thumbs against the steering wheel to the beat of whatever dubstep trash she’s put on.

“I think they need it,” Ginny finishes without any more explanation than that. She shrugs in her seatbelt and turns her face toward him with her dimples popping on her cheeks. “Besides, I’m way too tired to do that again.”

Mike decides then and there that he’s going to give her the best Christmas he knows how to. He has no idea how to do that, and it’s not like he can call her mom up and ask. Well, rather, he _could_ , but whatever there is to be worked out between the Bakers, Mike isn’t stupid enough to get in the middle of it. He did it exactly once, the night before the All Star game, and it ranks among the top ten most awkward nights of his life.

Instead, he drags Ginny to a tree lot on Christmas Eve and they spend the entire afternoon wrestling the stupidly large tree she chose into a new tree stand. She picks out riotously colorful strings of lights, glass icicles, and miles of tinsel, and Mike lets her put on some sugary Christmas pop while they split a bottle of wine and decorate their unimaginably ugly tree. By the time they’re finished, covered in sticky, sweet-sharp sap, they’re both a little warm from the wine. 

“God, it’s so ugly,” laughs Mike, padding into the kitchen to scrub the sap off his hands. But Ginny looks at it like it’s the most wonderful thing in the world, and maybe the tree isn’t as ugly as he thought. 

“I don’t care,” she declares. Ginny is the kind of person who’s disposed to laughter, but he thinks she actually looks _happy_ for the first time since God knows when. 

After she cleans up and pushes another bottle of wine into Mike’s hands to open, she dances back into the living room and admires the tree up close. When he comes back, she tosses her phone to him.

“Take a few pictures,” she instructs him carefully, grinning when Mike fumbles the phone in his hands. It’s literally his job to catch things, and he can see the humor flicker in her eyes, as if she’s thinking the same thing as him right now. 

Mike sets aside the wine. If they’re going to have an impromptu photo session, maybe he should wait on any more than he’s already had. “Something for Elliot to put up?” 

“I guess.” Ginny bites at her lip like she’s having second thoughts, but then she shrugs and waves at him to open the camera. “Take the picture. I want to remember this.” 

His eyebrows jump, but he swipes her camera open anyway. “Our ugly tree?” 

_Their_ tree. The idea makes Mike’s heart thud painfully in his chest. The lights gleam against her brown skin, leaving pools of muted color. They shimmer against her curls. She’s breathtaking. Suddenly, taking her picture while she adopts increasingly flirty poses seems like a dangerous idea, too close to talking about that night before the trade fell through. Mike almost forgot about it entirely, except the part where he’s still painfully in love and being around her is savagely invigorating. 

Mike makes himself snap a few pictures, good enough for social media or whatever else she plans to use them for, and Ginny doesn’t even ask him to retake any of them. Then he makes an excuse about needing to do something, when the reality is that he needs to do _anything_ but stare at her so obviously. 

For the first time since she first turned up at his house, Mike finds himself thinking that maybe he’s made a terrible mistake asking her to stay. They’ve made it two months without anything happening, not even when they’ve had a few drinks and end up laughing at dog videos on her phone. Mike is pretty sure he can make it another two as long as he also manages to cut out whatever part of his stupid brain made him fall in love with Ginny.

He goes to bed that night feeling a little dizzy, wine drunk and giddy from being around her. Mike tries telling himself to shove it all back down the way he has for the last two months. Longer even than that, if he’s being perfectly honest with himself. He rubs out a disappointing orgasm while trying to think of broad, abstract concepts that have nothing to do with Ginny, mops himself up with a tissue and thinks that he’s in much deeper shit than he thought.

He wakes up on Christmas morning like it’s any other day, goes through all the motions until Ginny comes jogging down the stairs about forty-five minutes later than usual, wearing her pajamas and an enormous grin. She’s carrying a wrapped tube in one hand and, damn her, Mike doesn’t think she’s at all hungover from their excessive drinking the night before.

“Merry Christmas,” she says with enthusiasm, almost dancing in place when she sets her package on the counter and goes to pour herself a cup of coffee. When she’s stirred in a little more milk than usual, she gestures to it like she can’t wait for him to open it. “You want to open your gift?” 

“Wow, you’re perky this morning,” he says, unable to keep from furrowing his brow at the wrapping paper. It’s better than thinking too hard about how _perky_ she is. Her wrapping job is pretty shitty, but Mike’s wrap job on the gift he left under the tree for her isn’t much better. When he reaches inside the cardboard tube, he finds a poster rolled up in a neat scroll. It’s her, pulled back in her wind-up, her face hard and serious and shadowed by her cap. 

“For your bedroom wall,” Ginny explains, wiggling with excitement. “I signed it for you, too.” 

“My hero,” says Mike dryly, but he feels more like he’s drowning. Jesus, she’s gotten under his skin and he isn’t sure how to get out of this without fucking the whole thing up. “I didn’t even know they sold these.” 

“I had to call Oscar,” she says, propping her chin up on her hands, elbows on the counter. “You like it?” 

“Well,” he says, rolling it up and sliding it very gently back into the tube. “It’s no rookie card to carry for luck.”

Ginny opens her mouth to say something smart in response, but it stops there, with her mouth half-parted. Then she bursts into giggles and says, “I can’t believe you, you enormous asshole.”

He is, but he’s also dead serious. He wasn’t kidding when he said that she was different than all the other rookies he’s known. It somehow seems fitting that he might end up with her rookie card, too. Mike decides he’ll go find one, someday when he’s not pretending he’s not in love with her.

But that’s the sort of thing they _don’t_ talk about. So, he shrugs and checks the fridge nonchalantly, like that’s all he means by it. “Are Ginny Baker cards too hard to get hold of by the woman herself?” 

“Oh, whatever,” Ginny laughs. “It’s Christmas. Have you got anything stronger to drink?” 

“It’s not even eight in the morning,” Mike deadpans, but he pulls down the whisky for her anyway. 

They spend most of the day like that, drifting in and out of each other’s orbit, watching Christmas movies and drinking. Ginny sits on the floor in front of the couch and opens his gift to her and busts out laughing when she pulls out a copy of _The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract_ and Don Zimmer’s autobiography. 

He jokes, “I’d have gotten you audiobooks, except you have to start owning _something_ sooner or later.”

“I own plenty of things,” Ginny says, flipping him off half-heartedly. 

“Yeah, about a thousand pairs of leggings.” Mike leans back on the couch, trying to hide that he’s foolishly pleased with himself when she starts flipping through the first book. 

“Oh, whatever, old man,” Ginny grins when she opens the book to one page and starts reading. “Are you in here?” 

He starts to tell her that it’s not really _that_ kind of book, and then he sees that she has the book open to the section on gameplay in the 1890s. “Hilarious, Baker,” he says. “Show some respect. I've been playing baseball since you were sitting on your twin bed, looking up at my poster and listening to the Backstreet Boys.”

“Oh,” Ginny giggles, leaning back against the couch and grinning at him over her shoulder. “You mean back when you _looked_ like a Backstreet Boy?” 

“You love it,” he says, choosing not to care for once that it’s more flirty than he’s let himself be around her. It somehow suits the mood of the day, that all their truces are suspended for Christmas. Eventually, they grab old gloves to play a light game of catch in his yard for half an hour, just to stretch and enjoy the weather. Ginny’s only just started throwing practice and Mike doesn’t want her throwing screwballs at him in the yard, but it’s still the kind of easy fun that they both need. 

They finally stop when Ginny pulls her buzzing phone from her pocket and frowns deeply at the screen. Mike is about to ask what’s wrong when she presses her finger to her lips and wanders out of earshot, but not before he hears: “Hey, Mom. Merry Christmas.”

Mike strips off his glove and watches Ginny wander from one edge of the yard to the other, pausing at the edge of the swimming pool and just _listening._ Her expression flickers past misery and straight on to frustration. 

“Okay, great, Mom,” she says, louder and more forcefully than anything else she’s said so far. “Yeah, bye.” Then she stares at the screen, her throat working furiously while she doesn’t bother masking her sneer. Mike waits until she returns it to her back pocket and smooths both palms over her eyes, sucking in her breaths. 

Well, it’s not like Mike doesn’t understand what that feels like. He hasn’t spoken to his mom in years, since the offseason after his rookie year. He wants to go back to the easy, light feeling he’s had all day, but she needs a friend. “That good?” 

Ginny looks up like she’s forgotten he was there. “Yeah,” she says flatly. “You want to drink that champagne Al sent?” 

More than she knows. Mike wants to drink a lot more than just that to suffocate the urge to pull her in his arms and tell her that she’s going to be okay. That it’s not always going to feel this bad between her and her mom, and maybe it’ll be better than it is for him. 

Instead, he pours champagne and cooks dinner for both of them. They drink until everything is hilarious and the lights on their tree begin to fuzz a little at the edges. All told, it’s probably the best Christmas Mike can remember. Even, maybe _especially_ when Ginny slides over into his shoulder, laughing at her own joke. She feels like a nova star beside him, emanating so much heat that Mike feels it not just through his clothes, but clear to his very core. 

“Not like Christmas in North Carolina, I take it,” he says, because it seems like a safe thing to say when she’s almost cuddling against his arm. 

“No,” Ginny snorts, pulls herself up and rests her cheek on his shoulder. “It’s a lot better than that.”

“A lot better than mine, too,” he says, tries to think if there’s something he should say to break the tension. A joke about spending Christmas with hot models, but settling for her, and Mike just can’t bring himself to do it. 

“Hey,” she says, curling her feet under her with her side pressed against his. “Mike.”

His whole body feels loose and languid, so he just flutters his eyes open and hums, “Yeah?” at her when she shifts up.

“I know you wouldn’t have done any of this if it weren’t for me. So, thanks for making it a good Christmas,” she says, and of _course_ she knows that he did it for her. Mike’s mouth goes uncomfortably dry. He isn’t really sure what he’s supposed to say to that, but he doesn’t have to, because Ginny turns next to him, pushes her hair back, and he’s distracted by her baby hair springing back into place.

“You’ve been doing a lot for me lately,” Ginny goes on, twisting her hands in her lap and suddenly Mike realizes exactly where this going. It’s not ignoring what happened in August. It’s the opposite of ignoring the tension between them. 

Mike doesn’t need her to thank him for being a decent human being, or a good teammate, which is what he’s been telling himself this is all along. All of a sudden, he knows that it’s exactly the kind of lie he wants to hear. It’s not about being decent, and she didn’t accept out of pure gratitude. “Ginny,” he starts to say, and knows instantly that it was the wrong thing to say. It’s like holding a match up to the curtains and hoping they don’t ignite. Something dark and warm flickers in her eyes.

There’s not really any stopping it after that. Ginny’s mouth is warm and impossibly soft, and she tastes like champagne and her citrusy lip balm. It’s a heady combination, but when she shifts toward his lap and coaxes his mouth open with a flick of her tongue along the seam of his lips, Mike hears the absurd noise that he makes. It’s everything he was afraid it would be in August. Everything he _hoped_ it would be, and then more than that. 

His hand reaches up to touch her cheek, to feel just how soft her skin is there, but Mike stops himself and closes it in a fist, dragging himself away with a shuddering breath.

“We can’t.”

Ginny’s eyes flash hurt for half a second, and then it’s like she remembers where they are. _Who_ they are and what they agreed on the mound in September. Or, what _Ginny_ decided and Mike agreed to, because Ginny’s more important than his stupid feelings. “Yeah,” she says, gently unfolding herself from him. “It’s late.” 

He sits up and stands up before her, desperate to hide the evident way that he wants her. Mike feels like a first-rate fool, thinking this wasn’t ever going to happen. “Merry Christmas, Ginny.”

“Merry Christmas,” she says, but her eyes track him across the room while he retreats toward the stairs. 

It doesn’t feel like a victory of his self-control, that he managed to pull back now. It feels like they already went too far. 

It feels a lot like losing.

*

Ginny disappears again over the next few days, to Mike’s enormous relief. She’s still in the house, but her morning run goes a little long and Mike times his workout so that he misses her before she heads to physical therapy. He’s got maybe six weeks before he has to report for spring training, but his head’s not in it. He spends fruitless hours staring off into space, willing his traitorous dick not to be hard _all the time_ when he thinks about Christmas, because it’s about the least helpful part of this.

What he really needs is a few days to clear his head, get back to the headspace where he doesn’t find it as hard to pretend around her. It isn’t that he didn’t already know that Ginny wanted him, because he did know that. That was clear as day before. It’s just that Mike was trying to make this better, and he’d actually thought this was going to work out. Except for Ginny. Again, he’d massively underestimated the Ginny Baker factor, that she’s impetuous and stubborn as hell and _she_ wants _him._

Ginny goes out with friends for New Year. Actually, she goes to a house party with the 23-year-old waitress she met at the party in L.A. back in July. When she stops in the kitchen wearing jeans and a tanktop with a plaid button-up tied around her waist is the first time Mike actually sees her for more than thirty seconds. 

“You look ready to ring in the new year,” he observes, looking up from trade news on his phone. The Padres have made a few moves in the offseason, but nothing Mike didn’t already expect. Somehow, it’s comforting for him.

“I’m going to play video games, drink some truly terrible hooch, and forget that my name is Ginny Baker for a night,” she explains so brightly that Mike could actually forget how awkward they’ve been for the last week. “I’ll be home late.”

“Make sure you get an Uber if you’re going to be drinking,” he says, looking back down to his phone. 

“Sure thing, _dad,_ ” she teases, and her grin falters at the exact second Mike’s stomach plummets through the floor and he looks up at her with his brow pulled down tight. 

“Yeah,” he says like he hasn’t just tried to swallow his tongue. “That’s not really my thing, Baker.”

“Right,” says Ginny when she chews the end of her lip. “Anyway, do you have plans, or are you planning to be a miserable asshole here?”

“Miserable asshole,” he says by way of answer, but there’s still a smile pulling at the edge of his mouth. “By the way, is that my shirt?” 

Judging by her guilty laugh, it is. Ginny shrugs it off and mumbles something about the laundry getting mixed up, and then she’s gone. 

Mike has a single beer and rereads Mantle’s autobiography for about the fourteenth time in his life. He clicks on the TV for the last three minutes of the year and watches the ball come down alone, and he’s in bed twenty minutes later, trying to wrap his head around the enormity of the year ahead of him. He lies there, stewing in his own thoughts until he hears Ginny stumble on the stairs around two in the morning, and then pitches forward into sleep almost the second her bedroom door closes behind her.

*

Ginny is already in the living room the next morning when he comes down, looking truly wretched over her coffee. She looks up when Mike comes down and for half a second, he thinks she’s going to leave and they’ll be back to whatever awkward ceasefire they’ve had for the last week. But then she nods at him and goes back to her coffee. Mike doesn’t misunderstand her, that this is a thaw between them.

It’s almost like it was before Christmas for the next few weeks. Ginny starts a throwing program in physical therapy and Mike works on strength training and keeping his knees from falling apart before Arizona. They have dinner together, except when Ginny and Evelyn resume regular nights out, and they fake it. There’s a taut thread of tension pulling between them at all times, but all it does is make Mike even more careful about what he says around her.

They don’t talk about August. They don’t talk about Christmas. Mike decides that this is how they get through the next year: simply by ignoring what it is they want and all the times it all comes bubbling up to the surface and they almost give in. 

Well, Mike can live with that if she can. He’ll have to.

The second week in January, Mike finally calls Al and breaks the news that he’s going to retire. Al doesn’t sound really surprised, which Mike expected, but he keeps him on the line for half an hour to just _talk_ about how he’s feeling, which Mike somehow didn’t. Then he thinks about a day in August, _This former catcher knows how your story ends._

Well, Mike doesn’t think he’d mind all that much if it ends a little more like Al’s life went for him: married with three daughters and Sunday dinners with his players. He appreciates it all the same, but he’s still stuck in that unproductive spiral when Ginny comes comes home from PT. 

He knows almost instantly that something’s wrong, just by the way she has her mouth pressed tight and her shoulders up near her ears. She looks like she wants to fight the world. Which Mike gets. He does. The difference between twenty-four and thirty-seven is really only how tired he is of the fighting. 

He tries to be as calm about as he can when he watches her drop her duffel by the counter. “Something happen today?”

“I’m fine,” she says, in the same voice that she says _we’re good_ , or that she’s decided they’re not going to talk about what they are to each other. That is to say, in the tone that immediately tells Mike that it’s a bald faced lie. Ginny throws herself into one of his chairs, her knee jittering nervously, then she hauls herself back up to pace again. 

Mike just watches her. “This doesn’t look like nothing, rookie.”

Ginny’s whole body turns toward him in a jerky motion, and everything sharpens into a conflagration of fury. She pushes her hair back, grips the back of the chair and spits, “Can you just – just _not_ call me that?” 

Suddenly, Mike knows what this is, and realizes that he’s been expecting exactly this fit of pique ever since he came to see her after surgery. Ginny wants to be infallible. She wants to be perfect at what she does, and she’s actually disappointed in herself when she finds out that she’s still as human as everyone else. 

And there, in direct contradiction with her fury at being just another injured ball player on the disabled list, she still just wants to be twenty-four and _normal._

This time, unlike that spectacular incident up on the mound when he treated her like a little girl who couldn’t handle her emotions, Mike keeps his trap shut and lets her vent. 

“What if I don’t get any better?” she asks, shoving back from the chair so fast that Mike’s almost up on his feet and after her before he can think twice. His knees spark a little in protest when he sits back down, just watches her hands flash angrily. “What if I got sixteen starts and that’s it for Ginny Baker? A flash in the pan. Footnote in history. A story to tell my grandkids.” 

It sounds bitingly familiar and Mike actually blushes to hear the worst of him thrown out in the middle of this. Well, he tries telling himself, he’s done his best to redeem that. It’s not like Ginny doesn’t know that he’s her biggest fan, bigger even than a horde of little girls with signs and tiny number 43 jerseys. Even if he’s started to wish that the same grandkids she’s going to tell about her spectacular major league career will be his, too; the same ones that _he’s_ holding on his knees and telling about Ginny Baker. 

Then she turns back toward him with such a heartbreaking expression that Mike wants to do literally anything at all to make it better for her. But that’s not his job, he reminds himself sharply, and Ginny doesn’t want someone to just _fix it_. She needs a friend. She needs a sympathetic shoulder, a voice of experience, and someone who loves her. 

She needs her _catcher._

Mike pulls in a long, sharp breath and starts assembling the things he needs to say now that she’s done shouting. He starts by standing up and tucking his hands into his jeans, looking thoughtfully at the reflection of their little scene in his darkened windows. Finally, Mike rubs his hand down his face and says, “I’ve seen a lot of rookies in sixteen years. Do you know how many I’ve seen flame out?”

“A lot, I’m sure. Is this the part where you tell me I’m different than them?” She sounds a little petulant, but Mike would rather die than tell her that. Especially now, when she’s genuinely frightened for what happens to her next. “That I just _blow you away?_ ”

“Well, that much hasn’t changed,” he admits. “Look, every single player who’s ever made it to the bigs worked their ass off to get there. I did. You did, probably more than any of the rest of us had to.”

He makes himself look at her directly, even though her expression is just as shattered as before. He asks, “You want to be a ball player, Baker?” 

That was not, apparently, what Ginny expected to hear. Her mouth falls open and Ginny rubs her hands down the sleeves of her athletic shirt, but she doesn’t look away. Mike knows it’s the question that’s haunted her for six months, ever since that breakdown in L.A. Ever since she went for that bunt in September. He remembers asking himself the same thing, but Ginny looks so painfully young that Mike hates himself all over again for falling in love with her, when she needs someone far better than a broken-down dinosaur at the sunset of his career.

“Well?” Mike doesn’t want to push, but he’s suddenly exhausted and he doesn’t want to let her wallow in her self-pity any more than she has to. It was one thing when she’d just had surgery, but Ginny Baker is extraordinary in every conceivable way, including, apparently, her capacity to recover from an injury that has ended careers of more pitchers than he cares to count. Maybe she had a bad day at PT. Maybe she thought she’d be ready. Maybe she just looked at the calendar and panicked about sitting out spring training, as if the Padres were going to leave her behind. 

“Yes,” says Ginny in a firm, decisive voice, and Mike believes her. 

“Good,” he says. “Because earning your place here isn’t easy, but keeping it is harder than you could even imagine. Sometimes it won’t matter how hard you work. You have to want it, Ginny.” 

It’s suddenly the right thing to say, not just for her. It’s for him, too, and Mike sees it dawn on her in real time, her big brown eyes showing that she’s calculating at the speed of light. She’s already realized that something isn’t right about any of this, but then Ginny takes half a step back, then two forward, _toward_ him. “You’re leaving. For real this time.”

“Retiring. I talked to Al today,” Mike tells her, scrubbing the heel of his hand into his eye, pulling on his hair. After all this time, after all he’s fought to stay where he’s at, Mike is surprised how much it doesn’t hurt to finally tell her, that he’s giving it up. He wanted it all for so long – the career, the wins, the ring – that it feels weird that he doesn’t anymore. He wants something so much different for the rest of his life.

“This is it,” he finishes simply, pulling his hand away and watching her face flip through a couple dozen different reactions.

“No,” she says blankly, when her expression finally settles on defiant. “I need you with me, Mike.”

“Ginny,” he says as seriously as he can while his heart cracks open in his chest, trying to keep it together for her, because _doesn’t she know?_ Doesn’t she know that he’d be with her to the end, no matter what? “I get it, but I’m falling apart. This one has to be it for me. This – two seasons playing with you – is all I'm going to get.”

Ginny crosses her arms over her stomach, like she knows where this is going and doesn’t want to be the one to say it. Mike can’t really blame her. If Mike were in her shoes, twenty-four and barely sure he’s going to get to play the last year of his contract, maybe he’d be feeling just as vulnerable as she is. 

But, Jesus, Mike is thirty-seven and he’s at the end of the line. He wants her to know that he’d go back, do the whole thing over from the start just so he could do it with her. For half an instant, he allows himself to imagine it all: sixteen years of catching her pitches, learning the game together, learning the other together. He wishes he knew how to tell her that he can’t give her what he wants to, but that he’ll give her everything he has left.

“How about this: I’ll do anything I can to get you back where you want to be. We’ll never talk about this – this _whatever_ it is that’s hanging between us.” 

“No,” Ginny repeats in exactly the same tone as before, rejecting _that_ idea as firmly as the idea that he might leave.

He’s so stuck on baseball that he doesn’t understand what she’s saying for a few painfully long seconds. Mike’s brain feels like it shorts out, skidding to a spectacular stop on that single syllable. He feels like he can’t breathe. He sure as hell can’t think straight. “What?” he asks with meaning. 

This isn’t the way he expected this would happen, even in the moments of fantasy where Mike let himself imagine ever getting anywhere with Ginny. He had every intention of running out the clock, getting through his last season, and maybe by then she’ll have moved on. It’s suddenly apparent to Mike that Ginny has no intention of waiting that long, that it was never his decision to defer at all. 

Ginny trips over her words, swallowing back a dozen things she could say now that would come close to reckoning their conversation in September on the mound with whatever this is. Finally, she squares her shoulders and says, “We’ve been avoiding this, haven’t we?” 

She knows the answer to that, Mike _knows_ she must, because she unfolds, totters toward him, and rocks up onto her toes to kiss him decisively. 

The whole thing comes unraveling after that, three months of pointedly ignoring what’s between them are gone in a second. Mike circles an arm around her waist, tucks her hair back, and realizes that Ginny is walking him back to the couch only when the backs of his knees hit the edge of the cushions and crack in protest. Mike goes down in an instant, pulling Ginny down onto his lap while she pulls uselessly at his t-shirt. _This is happening,_ he knows then, with the kind of staggering certainty and calm he gets when he’s behind the plate and can see the entirety of the next three plays. 

Ginny is the one to pull off her stretchy workout shirt, abandoning it to the cushions beside them while Mike struggles to get his t-shirt off. Mike leaves his sweatpants in place, although the expression on her face when Ginny looks down and sees his erection straining against the fabric is nearly enough to get him to pull them off, too. Ginny shimmies out of her sports bra and grins proudly at him when Mike actually stares at them like he can’t stop. She’s perfectly formed, from her pert, dark nipples, to her absurd six-pack, to the thick, crescent scar along the inside of her elbow. 

Then she moves again, not satisfied to stay still for him to admire her for too long. Her hands slide across his chest, carefully exploring with fingertips and fingernails, then she abruptly bends forward and bites a mark at the slope of his neck. 

“Jesus, Baker,” he barks out, as surprised as he is turned on by the stinging that lasts a few seconds after she soothes the ache with a puff of her breath. Mike didn’t know he could want anyone as much as he wants her right now, wants to let her have free reign over him as much as he wants to lay her down on his bed and worship every golden inch of her. 

“Too hard?” she asks in a bubbling tone that suggests she’s laughing. 

He reaches for her again by way of answer, pulling her mouth down to his neck and shivering all the way through his spine when she does it again. He slips his hand between her legs, two fingers pressed at her apex and drinking in the soft, mewling cry she makes, all of her body arching by way of answer. She’s soaked through her underwear and leggings both. Mike is struck by the overwhelming urge to roll both garments down to her ankles and lift her over his face. He has a brief vision of Ginny gripping the couch, grinding down onto his face, soaking his beard, and it nearly paralyzes him with need before he slides his hands under her ass and deadlifts her in a single motion from the couch, determinedly ignoring the shudder in his knees. 

“I know you’re not going to carry me all the way upstairs, old man,” Ginny teases, mouthing at his earlobe, but she doesn’t protest or squirm, even when Mike makes it a few steps with her in his arms. Then she slides down out of his arms and grabs his hand, leading him upstairs.

Mike ends up pinned to the wall in the hallway outside his bedroom, Ginny’s hand on his neck and his palming at her ass, but they fall into his room and pull urgently at what’s left of their clothes. Mike watches in open admiration while Ginny tucks her thumbs into her boyshorts and pulls them off in a single, efficient maneuver. 

“No teasing,” he warns, dragging her in closer and pressing a single, affectionate kiss at the corner of her mouth. Mike bends forward, meaning to kiss his way down the flat plane of her stomach, and his lips brush the tight bud of her nipple on his way down. The noise she makes – eager and urgent – stops him dead and he dedicates himself to this brand new revelation. 

He circles his tongue around, allowing a single scrape of his teeth, and privately celebrating the immediacy of her reaction. 

“Who’s teasing now?” Ginny pants, and Mike looks up at her at the same second she reaches for him. Her mouth is parted eagerly when she wraps her fingers around the base of his cock and pulls upward, and Mike realizes that he’s making a truly absurd, half-strangled sound. Her hand is rough with callouses that drag along his shaft, and he bucks forward into her hand with a tremendous groan that feels like it fills his whole chest. In an instant, her eyes fly to his and he almost regrets it, except that there is heat there. Heat, and not a little bit of hopeful longing. 

_Fuck,_ thinks Mike with a flood of affection and fear, and a little trepidation he can’t remember feeling with any of his previous partners. But, then again, when has he ever risked so much for something other than baseball? Certainly not for love. Not until Ginny. It seems appropriate, somehow, that they’re taking the same risk here.

“The bed,” he suggests instantly, his hands clasping her elbows when he pulls her toward his mattress. Ginny nods along with it, but she turns him around until the backs of his knees collide with the mattress, and then she’s shoving him down into its luxurious comfort. 

“Do you mind?” she asks in a voice that tells him that she really, truly hopes he doesn’t. 

And – no, of course he doesn’t. Mike presses a single weak, whine into her mouth and Ginny swallows it meaningfully. He realizes with a start that she’s kneeling over him, they’re both naked, and they’re already so much further than he thought they were. 

“Condoms in the nightstand,” he says, jutting his chin toward the side of the bed he always sleeps on. Ginny lunges for the drawer, fumbles around until she finds one she likes, and tears it open with her teeth. Though his hands are shaking, Mike takes it from her and rolls it down his cock, his eyes locked on her as he does. 

Ginny’s throat works slowly, like she can’t believe this is happening, either, and, well Mike knows exactly what it’s like to be so astonished by reality. He can’t believe that it’s happening, either. But it is. It’s happening now. This has always been happening, like they’ve been moving to this place from the moment they met. 

Mike pulls her back in for a long kiss, clacking teeth together and pulling apart so he can take her plush lower lip between his. Ginny slings one leg over his hips and she reaches for Mike’s cock at the same second he does, their fingers bumping as they work together to line up. When the fat head of his cock bumps against her clit, Ginny whimpers, and again when the first inch of his dick slides in at just the right angle, first try and everything. Then she straightens, rolls her hips forward and down, sliding home in a single motion that makes Mike feel like there are stars exploding somewhere behind his eyes. 

Her hand braces against his stomach for leverage and Mike rocks up into her when Ginny sits back onto his cock, moaning like he’s knocked it out of her. There’s no way he’s going to last like this, he knows it from the second her eyes fly open the first time they get the rhythm just right. He presses two fingers against her clit, wants to say something, wants to say _everything_ to her.

“Come on, Baker,” he coaxes, like he’s the one in control here, even though Mike has never felt less composed in bed before in his life. 

Her brown eyes blink open, twinkling with mirth, or something totally different than that. “Are you going to talk dirty to me, Lawson?” 

“Helping you live the dream,” he pants back, as though this isn’t every one of his own dreams come to life. Everything he’s longed for since this whole thing started, and reality is so much better than he could have ever imagined. 

“Oh, _shit,_ ” Ginny swears at that, blinking quickly and losing her rhythm. Her cunt clenches around him and her shoulders drop, and Mike thinks he’ll never, ever forget her staccato cries. He steadies her with his hands on her hips and thrusts upward wildly, feeling the telltale flood of warmth in his limbs just before he’s coming explosively, hauling Ginny down for a hard kiss while he empties himself into the condom.

When he blinks his eyes open again, Ginny looks up at him with her chin on his chest and Mike smiles wearily. “Not how I expected that conversation to go,” he says, combing his fingertips through her wild curls and massaging her scalp with them.

“Do you mind?” asks Ginny, humming appreciatively and rolling off him. “

“Are you kidding?” he groans, pulling off the condom, tying it off and dropping back into the pillows. 

Ginny drops back against his chest and doesn’t say anything for a long time, thoughtfully tracing shapes on his chest. 

“You'd never get a ring catching my fastball,” she says into his bare neck after a long time, looking about how Mike has felt for the last few months, when he finally realized that he had to retire. Maybe she’s a little scared, but at least she’s thinking about what life in the majors is going to be like without him, instead of what life will be like without baseball. “Not if you caught it for another fifteen years.”

“Fuck the ring. Fuck the Series,” Mike says and means it more than he ever thought he would. He reaches for her, making a little, satisfied noise when she rests heavily against him, rakes his fingertips down the smooth, perfect line of her side. “I’ll settle for getting to catch your fastball again at all.” 

It’s about as close as Mike thinks he can allow himself to get to what he really means before he actually looks at her, locks eyes with her. Ginny’s whole body shivers under his palms and Mike presses his forehead to hers, maddeningly slow. 

“Mike,” she shudders out, but she’s brave and she doesn’t look away. Neither does he when he says against her mouth, “You know what I’m trying to say.”

Her lips brush his. Her eyelashes brush his cheeks. Without even looking, he’d know that she’s looking directly at him, like she’s about ready to deliver a speech of her own. “Say it,” she breathes.

“You don’t need to hear me say–”

“Say it,” she commands again in the voice that makes Mike want to jump off bridges for her.

God help him, he does. “I love you. Do you know how long I’ve loved you?”

“No,” she laughs, turning her face into his, chasing him down for a kiss of her own. “Tell me.”

“You’re not going to get me to pour my heart out _and_ embarrass myself in the same night,” Mike groans, swatting her ass. Ginny shifts against him, lifts her head and kisses him hard and he thinks that maybe he will end up doing both before the night’s over. She pulls back and flashes a shy smile at him, eyes heavy and sated, and he knows that he’ll do anything for her. 

“Tomorrow night, then,” she offers instead, tucking her head in the hollow left between his neck and shoulder, rubbing her cheek against his beard sleepily.

“Go to sleep,” he suggests, as if he’s not already halfway there himself, but Ginny’s only answer is a slow, happy sigh that cuts straight through him.

*

Mike wakes up early the next morning, pulls on a pair of gym shorts and pads down to the kitchen to start coffee. It’s probably just after six, he thinks without looking at a clock, judging only by the shades of light creeping across the sky. Ginny will probably sleep another half an hour, and then she’s going to want to go for her morning run before weights. Most days she has physical therapy, a visit with her pitching coach, maybe a team doctor or three, but he doesn’t actually know about today.

It’s been four months since Ginny was injured and Mike’s leaving for Arizona in barely a month. The thought that he might leave her here is too awful to consider, so he doesn’t. Mike makes breakfast and is about to bring her coffee and avocado toast when he hears her jogging down the stairs, yawning and rubbing a hand through her hair. 

When he looks up at her, she’s wearing one of his hoodies over the boyshorts she must have fished off the floor. Mike forces himself to swallow down the tidal wave of sheer lust that almost winds him, staring openly as Ginny shoves the too-big sleeves of his sweatshirt up her arms. He wants to pull it off of her again and fuck her against the kitchen counters. He wants to have her for breakfast, her mile-long legs draped over his shoulders, knees clamped against his ears. He also wants to pull her up into his chest and just _be_ for a while, smelling citrus from her lip balm and vanilla from her lotion.

“You made me breakfast?” she asks, as if he hasn’t made her breakfast nearly every morning since she moved in. But there’s a little smile quivering at the edge of her mouth, as if she can’t believe what she’s seeing now.

For about half a second, Mike wonders if she still looks at him and sees only her baseball idol, or if she actually sees _him_. He’s literally never thought that once the entire time she’s lived here, and he doesn’t want to start now. He shakes it off and pushes a plate toward her, watching when she slides into the bar stool on the other side of the counter, chewing the inside of her cheek nervously. 

“And here I thought you might be a cuddler,” she teases, but Mike doesn’t misunderstand. She’s choosing her words carefully, teasing where she’s feeling wary. Ever since the last night in August, their whole relationship has been hinged on the promise that they’d forget that they’re both painfully attracted to the other for the sake of the team. And what are they supposed to be now that the whole premise of their truce has come apart? 

“You wanted the full Mike Lawson experience,” says Mike, pulling milk from the fridge and setting it in front of her.

“Lucky me.” Ginny sucks thoughtfully on the end of her spoon when she’s done stirring milk into her coffee, looking curiously at the avocado toast. 

Mike takes a long drink of his coffee, keeps looking at her over the rim of his cup. Things are different with them already. And, well, _yeah_ , Mike thinks sharply. They were different when she moved in, too. But now he knows the exact tenor of her cries, how her voice goes hoarse and low when she’s on the edge of coming, like it does when she’s laughing about something. The exact way her whole body shudders through her orgasm. How in the hell is he supposed to go back to pretending nothing happened?

“Let me know when you finish your run this morning,” he finally says, setting down his cup and straightening his back. Ginny’s eyes zip across the plateau of his bare chest, openly admiring before she remembers where she is and who he is and looks back down to the toast. 

“Uh, sure,” she says articulately, clears her throat and adds, “I haven’t really got plans today.”

“Good. I have plans for you.” Something shadowy and longing passes through her eyes, and Mike actually flushes a little. “Not that,” he adds and goes back to the coffee pot to refill his mug as an excuse to look away. He doesn’t plan _not_ to fuck her again, it’s just that there are other things that need reaffirming first. 

“All right,” she says after a few seconds, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. “I’m gonna go do my run.”

Mike waves with one hand, without looking back at her, and leans heavily against the counter when he hears her disappear back upstairs. He hopes to God that he doesn’t have to pretend the night before didn’t happen. Frankly, it’s not really an option, but neither is letting it ruin a good thing. It’s not enough that Mike’s helplessly, stupidly in love with her, and it’s not enough that he wants her, wants a life with her, more than anything else in his life. Wants her to want him that way. 

Mike goes to the gym and works out until his back twinges with a promise of crushing pain, and then stands in his shower for nearly half an hour, although it washes her smell off him. By the time he’s dressed in a clean set of training clothes and checking the news on his phone, Ginny finally emerges from her room, flipping her shower-damp hair into a ponytail.

“You’re not planning to take me on a date, are you?” she asks, skirting the edge of the room as if she’s nervous about coming too close to him. “I’m not sure I’m ready to go public after–”

“Just change into some fresh clothes and grab your glove,” he says, rolling his eyes. And though he’d like to show her to the whole fucking world, wants to go stand in front of a sold-out crowd at Petco and shout about how much he loves her, that’s not really in the cards right now. Not for another nine months, at _least._

They listen to the radio on the way over to the field, Ginny reaching out to stop Mike from changing the station. “I don’t mind,” she says, her toes tapping nervously. It’s bullshit, of course, because Mike’s heard what she listens to, and it’s not this. It’s better than awkward silence, though. 

There are offsite training facilities they could go to. And maybe they _should_ be going to. There’s a spare crew of staff working Petco in the offseason, so they’ll be on their own here. But Mike knows his way around and he thinks it’s probably important that they do this here. 

He waves her down an empty corridor, shrugs his duffel higher on his shoulder and asks, “You’ve got your glove?” At her sudden blink of surprise, Mike raises his eyebrows. “You’ve got a rehab schedule to keep up with, Baker. Did you think I was going to go easy on you because you finally got me in bed with you?” 

“No,” she snorts, but she still looks genuinely amazed as she reorders her thoughts before his eyes. “I mean, I have my glove. I just thought – I mean, I’ve done some throwing, but…”

“I’ve worked with pitchers after surgery before,” Mike reminds her, beckoning her to follow him down the corridor to one of the training rooms. “Come on, I want to see how you’re doing.”

Mike pulls on his gear silently, wincing when his back pulls in the wrong way, gives a sharp kind of pain that tells him he probably went a little _too_ hard with her. Ginny sees it, purses her lips together and says, “Sure I didn’t break your back, old man?”

“Actually,” says Mike, pulling his mask down over his face and dropping into his crouch. “You probably did. Now, let’s see your fastball. Nothing fancy. Nice and straight.”

She’s been practicing that one in physical therapy, and it’s a good marker for how she’s feeling. When her concentration isn’t suffering, Ginny is pretty good at getting her pitches where he calls them. They do the curve next and, because she’s loosening up a little, he calls for her screwball. She wavers a little for the first time, like she’s nervous. It goes way too high and he springs up to grab it out of the air. 

“I know,” she says instantly, before he can even think to say anything, rubbing her hand down her face. “Again.”

Mike shrugs and takes position again, though he’s sure he’s seen this look on her before. It’s the same despairing, desperate look she gets when she’s about to start tearing herself down. It’s the same one she had during that first start, what feels like a million years before, and the same as the night before, when she made it clear that the thing that scared her most was never getting back to her mound. But if he doesn’t let it get to him, it won’t get into her head, and that’s all she needs. She just needs a win. Mike can do that for her.

She throws it again. This time it hits his glove at an angle, but it’s there, nestled in the center of his glove. The one after that is a little outside, would be a ball, but he’s got it anyway. He lets her choose her pitches after that, but when she throws her fifth screwball right into the center of his glove, when that clean, sharp sound of the ball hitting home in his hand fills his ears, Mike pulls up his mask and forces himself to his feet, ignoring the ripple of pain in his back.

Ginny is slick with sweat, but she doesn’t appear to have any pain. It’s not over – God, it’s so long before she’s done with rehab and can go back on the mound – but it’s a start. It’s the kind of start she needed, too.

“Not bad,” he says and sees the tension break on her face, like she was waiting for something else. Waiting for it to be different, he realizes with a sharp, uncomfortable jerk somewhere behind his navel. Waiting for everything they’ve worked for to stop mattering. 

Mike lifts his chin to her, flips the ball back to her. “I’d tell you to hit the showers, but we’re going to have to do that at home,” he says with a grin, unstrapping his pads. “Sorry.” 

Ginny’s eyes follow his hands, squeezing long fingers around the ball in her right hand, like she’s thinking hard about something. Mike has half an idea what it is by the time she drops the ball to the padded floor and grabs the front of his t-shirt, pulling him down for a kiss. His pads go crashing down beside their feet when Mike’s hands reach for her shoulders, pulling her close. He wants to wrap himself around her, but he settles for circling an arm around her waist and bending down so Ginny has an easier time teasing his mouth open. 

When she releases her grip on him, Mike dares to open his eyes again. He’s just in time to see her blink up at him, storming through confusion and naked want and uncurling something warm and fond that he thinks he recognizes.

“Say it,” he suggests, swallows her laugh in a flurry of light kisses.

“I love you,” says Ginny Baker, and – _Jesus,_ Mike realizes with a crack of adrenaline that spikes down through his knees, roots him in place. He doesn’t know how to deal with someone looking at him the way Ginny is looking at him right now. Ginny. _Ginny fucking Baker,_ he tries reminding himself, and suddenly Mike thinks he knows exactly how Ginny must have felt the first time they met. 

“I thought,” she starts to say. Stops, catches herself trying to choose her words carefully.

He asks, “You didn’t know if you wanted things to change?” Because what would be the point of going through with this if he loses the thing that made him love her all along? 

Ginny nods. “Or if I wanted them to stay the same, either.”

“No wonder your pitches were all over the place.” Mike laughs when she raps the back of her knuckles against his chest, catches it before she can pull away and presses his lips to the center of her palm. This hand can do magic, he tells himself, but the woman it belongs to is more precious than just the parts of her that made her famous. 

“It feels weird doing this here,” Ginny says finally, looking like she’s trying to suppress the urge to laugh. Probably his beard is a little ticklish against her hand. “At the stadium.” 

“It’s all part of it,” he says, meaning the two of them. They’re ballplayers from surface to core, not just part of who they are separately, but part of who they are together. Whatever it is they are now, teammates and friends and lovers, doesn’t totally make sense to him, but it’s _right_. It’s scary how right it is, being in this place, doing this thing that’s taken everything, given everything. Ginny knows it as well as Mike does. 

Somehow, it’s different, but it’s the same.

He gives her a playful nudge with his elbow. “Besides, you smell like a locker room.” 

“Oh, whatever. Take me home, old man,” laughs Ginny, seizing her duffel bag and heading out to the corridor ahead of him, and it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.


End file.
